Spotlight into additive

摘要

The space-age silver disk of the Diamond Light Source sits in the Oxfordshire landscape like a recently landed flying saucer. Inside, powerful magnets accelerate electrons around a circuit shaped like a many-sided polygon and, at each shallow vertex, intense X-rays are directed into hutch-like laboratories where they are used to probe the properties of matter, helping uncover information about substances whose atoms form regular patterns. X-rays can penetrate crystals and the lattice structures of metals and their atoms scatter the radiation in characteristic ways that reveal how they are organised. X-ray crystallography's origins are in fundamental.